I hated being me, says former teen idol Donny Osmond

Donny Osmond was an idol in his teens but washed up by 25. Here he reveals he hated fame, despised his biggest hit and bitterly resented the pushy father who made him a star...

Donny Osmond is talking about the day in 1982 when he woke up, brushed The Teeth and decided he didn't want to be Donny Osmond any more.

"I realised I had to be someone else, because Donny Osmond wasn't working for me," he says.

Actually, Donny Osmond wasn't working for anyone any more; the original boy-band superstar was all washed up at 25, a failure, too old for Puppy Love, his most famous song.

So, what went wrong in the garden of paradise and toothsome smiles?

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Teen idol: Donny Osmond in his heyday, but by the time he was 25 he was washed up

Teen idol: Donny Osmond in his heyday, but by the time he was 25 he was washed up

All child star stories are strange - Mickey Rooney, for example, could get work in the 1960s only as a Mickey Rooney impersonator - but Donny's wins first prize.

It unfolds like a parable.

There were nine little Osmonds, born to George, a Mormon sergeant major, and his wife Olive, in Ogden, Utah. Four of the older boys - Alan, Wayne, Merrill and Jay - formed a quartet called The Osmonds and appeared on the Andy Williams TV show in the early Sixties.

Donny today: He is father to five sons and two grandchildren

Donny today: He is father to five sons and two grandchildren

They were Utah's answer to the Von Trapp Family Singers but were - if it is possible - even more impossibly cute. When he was five, Donny joined them and became the front man, which involved dressing as a mini-Elvis and smiling a lot.

"I went from an innocent child to a national television star," Donny says, looking exactly like Donny Osmond circa 1976, but about two stone heavier.

"My career took on a life of its own."

He's 50 in December and swears - at first - that he hasn't had cosmetic surgery.

I'm not sure I believe him - he shares similarities in his appearance with Cliff Richard - and eventually he admits to Botox, "just once and I wouldn't do it again because afterwards there was no expression on my face".

Say what you like, Donny is big on self-pity, which is why in the run-up to his latest tour he wants to talk about how hard it was being the Most Adorable Singing Child On Earth.

A few days ago he cried on a chat show when he was asked if he was angry with his father for driving him on.

Then he said he wished he had stayed in Utah. Now he begins to tell me why.

"I was nine years old and on a six-week tour of Sweden with my father, playing three shows a day," he says.

Donny talks in the ultra-calm voice of a religious believer or a man who has had a lot of psychotherapy.

"I was so homesick," he says.

"I wrote a letter to my mother, begging her to come and get me."

He didn't show this to his father, but his older brother Jay - who was whisked out of the spotlight when Donny arrived - told on him. Oh, those Osmond boys -- one big happy family.

"It was a very difficult time," says Donny. "My father wasn't happy."

Needless to say, his mother didn't rescue him.

"Have you forgiven your father?" I ask.

"Oh, yes," says Donny, all too swiftly.

"It was the way he'd been conditioned himself. And he had a very hard life: his father died after he was born and he never knew him.

"What was he going to do? Cancel the show? He had responsibilities to his family. And we are a very strong family."

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After the phenomenal success of Puppy Love, Donny presented The Donny & Marie Show, a TV variety programme with his sister (above)

Although Mother Osmond is dead - very gravely, he calls his parents Mother and Father - his dad lives five minutes away from his house in Utah and they see each other every week. Indeed, Donny carries a Mormon blessing from him saved on his Blackberry.

Then he moves on to the next Osmond horror story, a few No1s down the line: the celebrity appendectomy. One night during a show Donny, then aged 15, developed abdominal pains and was rushed to hospital - after the performance, not before.

There was nothing about Donny that wasn't newsworthy in the Seventies - even his internal organs were public property.

When he woke up after the operation, there was a photographer from Tiger Beat magazine in the room.

"The photographer said: 'We need to get some pictures of you, Donny'," he recalls. "'Look like you're in pain'."

"I complied," says Donny.

"It was only years later that I thought: 'I'd had a major operation, I almost lost my life...'

"At the time, I did what they needed me to do because I realised millions of girls were going to read Tiger Beat and I had to put on a good show. The harder you worked, the bigger star you became. At least that's what I thought."

The graft paid off: when Donny was 15, he released Puppy Love.

"Someone help me, help me, help me please," he sang convincingly.

It made him the biggest teen idol ever; girls chased him into restaurants, and screamed and passed out in his presence, although he says proudly that he never slept with them, or drank, or even smoked.

Although it seems a contradiction, he says Jesus Christ and Elton John are his heroes.

"I try to be a good guy and I fall short sometimes, but I use Christ as an example," he says.

"What is the worst thing you have done?" I ask.

This question upsets him.

"Why do people ask me that?" he asks plaintively.

Because you are a poster boy for adolescent beatitude, I tell him. We want to see the angel stumble into Hell.

"Do I have to say I am bad to justify the fact that I am real?" he sighs.

After Puppy Love, he presented The Donny & Marie Show, a TV variety programme with his sister, and in 1978 he married Debbie Glenn, his childhood sweetheart whom he met through the Church. (They now have five sons and two grandchildren.)

The fans hated the fact that he was no longer fully theirs: they sent hate mail to Debbie and burned Donny's records at parties.

"But the flip side was that I finally did something for me," he says.

"After that, half of me belonged to the public. The other half is sacred to Debbie."

But the star was fading.

In 1979 the show was cancelled, and in 1982 Donny bombed in his Broadway debut, Little Johnny Jones. The reviews were vicious: Puppy Love no more, but Puppy Hate.

I ask him why he thinks he fell. He doesn't answer directly.

Instead, he asks me what music I liked when I was 13. Bros, I say, shrugging my shoulders. A-ha.

"OK," says Donny, "where are they today? Where is A-ha? Where is Bros?"

He has switched suddenly, from disinterest to intensity, almost to pain.

"Where are they?" he repeats.

Whatever, the money disappeared, embezzled or spent, and he won't say who was responsible - his brothers, his parents, the men they employed to look after it?

"I have never asked for the details," he says.

"What was I going to do about it?"

What he could do was flee from himself, as fast as his spandex legs could carry him.

Michael Jackson told him to "change your name, Donny. Your name is poison".

Osmond didn't change his name, but he did consider appearing on stage only in silhouette, so people wouldn't realise who he was.

"I was going to appear as a mystery singer," he says.

"I decided to dismantle everything and return through the back door. And that is exactly what happened."

In 1988, after nearly ten years of playing high school halls, and waiting, Donny's promoter released Soldier Of Love as a mystery song - they played the song without revealing Donny as the singer.

It was a hit and Andrew Lloyd Webber cast him as Joseph in Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat on Broadway.

He had to sing "Close every door to me/ Hide all the world from me... Darken my daytime/ And torture my night" and I suspect there was no need to ask him to do it again but with more feeling.

As soon as he was up again, he was down, this time with mental illness.

Successful once more, and rich, he had crippling anxiety attacks.

"I thought I would lose my career again," he says.

"And so you become a perfectionist and you constantly berate yourself, saying: 'I am not as good as I can be'."

He turned to psychotherapy and eventually, he says, the attacks stopped and he settled in to moderate, goodnatured fame - the odd chat show, a tour here and there, a website that sells Donny sandals.

Do you wish you had never been famous?

"Knowing what I know now and what I have been through, would I do it the same?" he slowly asks himself.

"I look at the alternative - a very simple life. It would have been nice to have a simple life."

Suddenly, he starts singing Puppy Love at me.

"And they call it Puppy Loooove." It's almost as if he yearns for that past life.

When he stops, he insists he has learned "to be comfortable with who I am; the kid who did sing Puppy Love".

I am not sure - lesser fame than little Donny's can take a lifetime to get over, but again, he says: "I am fine with Puppy Love.

"I hated it for a while. But I still sing it.

"I have a country version, a sexy version and a cheesy nightclub version. I am trying to infuse it with maturity.